Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Measuring Viral activity
Sometimes the jargon we use makes it more difficult to understand what is actually quite simple. Today on LinkedIn answers, I saw a question from a young woman in Romania. She asked, "
So, what is "viral traffic"? It's activity arising from viral marketing, which Wikipedia defines as "marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses".
The emphasis on social networks in the Wikipedia answer highlights that these are efforts directed at humans, as opposed to scripts and search algorithms.
So, as we look at visits by referral source, I'll assert that all non-search referrals (with the exception of those from script-driven news sites), can be considered viral traffic.
As to the percentage, it, of course, varies widely, depending on the nature of your site, how often you provide fresh content, how well you uses RSS as a syndication mechanism, how interesting that content is to blog and news sites, and then how well their take on your content incites the readers of the blogs and news sites to follow the link back to your site.
It puts the onus on our content providers to write both for the search engines and for the wholesale syndicators, those bloggers who follow our site and the keywords around which we are writing. But the benefits are great.
But the benefits are great. One of our client content sites just had its second best week of the last year from one very viral story.
Can you estimate the viral traffic? If so what is the percentage we are talking about?
So, what is "viral traffic"? It's activity arising from viral marketing, which Wikipedia defines as "marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses".
The emphasis on social networks in the Wikipedia answer highlights that these are efforts directed at humans, as opposed to scripts and search algorithms.So, as we look at visits by referral source, I'll assert that all non-search referrals (with the exception of those from script-driven news sites), can be considered viral traffic.
As to the percentage, it, of course, varies widely, depending on the nature of your site, how often you provide fresh content, how well you uses RSS as a syndication mechanism, how interesting that content is to blog and news sites, and then how well their take on your content incites the readers of the blogs and news sites to follow the link back to your site.
It puts the onus on our content providers to write both for the search engines and for the wholesale syndicators, those bloggers who follow our site and the keywords around which we are writing. But the benefits are great.
But the benefits are great. One of our client content sites just had its second best week of the last year from one very viral story.
Labels: blogs, content creation, RSS, viral marketing, viral referrals
